Aunt Fiona has decided it’s time to downsize and move into one of those trendy 55-and-over communities. We’d love to buy her house—it’s been in the family for generations—but there’s no way we could get approved for a home loan that big. Happily, Aunt Fiona wants to keep the house in the family too, so she’s agreed to something called a purchase-money mortgage, or PMM.
A “purchase-money mortgage” happens when the seller of a house offers mortgage financing to the buyer of the house. Yes, that’s right: we’re securing a mortgage from Aunt Fiona herself. On the plus side, this allows us to “qualify” for a loan we’d never have qualified for otherwise. It’s just like a bank loan, but instead of sending our payments to the bank, our down payment and monthly mortgage go straight to Aunt Fiona.
And it isn’t only relatives who can get in on the PPM action, FYI. Whenever a seller has a buyer who doesn’t quite meet the qualifications for the loan needed to complete the purchase, they can opt to go the PPM route, either for the whole purchase amount, or just enough to bridge the gap between the amount of the bank loan and the home’s sale price.
Is this still a legally binding, credit-score-impacting kind of arrangement? It is indeed, and this is where the potential drawbacks come into play. PPMs usually come with higher interest rates than standard home loans, since the borrowing terms are a lot less strict. This means that we’re likely to end up paying more in the long run for the family home than we would have if we’d bought it conventionally. Also, though PPMs usually come with super-flexible payment terms—i.e., we can make a full payment this month but make an interest-only payment next month, etc.—those super-flexible payment terms can make it really easy to make small payments when money is tight…and then realize later that we haven’t been paying down the principal amount of the loan nearly as much as we should have been.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is Adjustable-Rate Mortgag...17 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is adjustable rate mortgage or arm
Well here's an arm and here's a leg and that's
What Renting the money to buy a home costs you
Yeah Okay Eight r m stands for adjustable rate mortgage
The rate well that's The interest cost of the money
or the cost of renting that money to buy the
home Well the rate isn't it fixed in this case
like five point seven percent for thirty years Where you
know in advance that your monthly payments going to be
nine hundred forty three bucks a month or whatever it
is that would be a fixed mortgage a fixed number
You can count on it for all three hundred sixty
payments And then the house is all yours So that's
fixed then what's adjustable like yes the interest rate changes
But how does it change Well in a standard arm
there is some global standard on which the rates are
often price like lie bore the london interbank borrowing offering
rate It's one of the key things that price is
the cost of renting money all around the world with
the actual rate of libel or is generally reserved for
banks like super cheap cost of renting money to banks
who are very likely to pay back the money with
no hassle that rate is more or less what banks
pay for running the money along with blue chip customers
in real life The banks then mark up a premium
on top of the rate that they're paying to rent
the money to themselves And then they resell or re
rent that money teo their prized customers So the pricing
of bank my views in renting money to joe six
pack could be something like lie boer plus three percent
or three hundred basis points So if libel or is
it didn't say two and a half percent today the
adjustable rate might be five and a half percent and
all that's great honor given alone It might mean that
for a while you're paying seven hundred twelve dollars a
month for your house payment wonderfully cheap and in fact
banks market these low rates initially to help people be
able to afford tto by that new home and live
of the dream You know the american dream usually with
an arm there's a teaser rate that starts really low
Like at live or live or plus ten basis points
or something like ridiculously cheap for six months or a
year something like that Then it has an incremental set
of step ups in interest costs and venit adjust with
the markets usually upward maybe upward by a lot Remember
there's a reason it's called a teaser rate but then
if we get inflation or a you know just bank
nervousness for there are weird effects from brexit or the
volume of transactions going through london or something weird happens
Well then the liquidity drops and interest rates rise So
now lie board goes up and up and up to
four and a half percent and wealth contractually in your
mortgage paperwork you have to pay live or plus three
hundred basis points no matter what So now that's seven
and a half percent interest on the dough you borrowed
and well we're that toe happen It's likely that your
monthly payment has skyrocketed from seven hundred twelve dollars a
month is something more like twelve hundred dollars a month
or more Can you handle that big of a payment
Well have you done a fixed rate loan at nine
Hundred forty three dollars a month Well you'd still be
paying on that number but you rolled the dice with
an arm and now you owe big bills There go
that arm and a leg thing we warned you about 00:03:26.033 --> [endTime] eh
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